This really makes me question the value of my life’s work. I looked at my friend as she finished this statement, wondering if this was sarcasm or something more serious. We had just entered a large gymnasium in Memphis filled with nursing students, medical equipment, and several hundred people experiencing homelessness gathered for a homeless health care day. Those living in poverty could receive basic health and dental screenings and medical students could practice their skills and accrue required community service hours. The scene was somewhat chaotic and apprehension was evident in the faces of many of those awaiting medical care and many of those providing medical care, but nothing in the environment made me question my life’s calling.
What do you mean? I asked.
She seemed to be counting, disappointment and agitation growing in her expression.
I’ve housed these people already. In the last five years, I’ve housed at least twenty – no, twenty two – of the people standing in line here for services. Hours of case management, housing applications, landlord agreements, moving days and furniture searches – for what?!? Here they are, homeless again. What’s the point?
Most work to address homelessness includes prescribed outcomes or deliverables which must be measured and reported. Like the business world, the non-profit economy demands results and evidence of success. Yet, the non profit sector does not promote a product or create sales goals, it measures success in people. People who have their own unpredictable goals and ideals. People with struggles, dysfunctional behaviors, and even total failures. In order to consistently work toward a desired goal with people, we must carefully consider how we individually and corporately define success, regardless of outcomes reported or budgets reconciled. We must hold the tension of properly stewarding the resources we have to share and generously giving of ourselves without condition or expectation.
My friend in Memphis worked for an organization created to help people without housing find housing. And she did that. She created relationships with landlords and apartment managers and she creatively and beautifully found ways to connect her neighbors who needed housing with those who owned or managed housing. She went a step further and created partnerships with local thrift stores and churches who would donate furniture and other essentials to new residents. Some of those she assisted thrived in their new homes. Some did not. Relapse into substance use or complex mental illness, unauthorized roommates, poor stewardship of the property, domestic disturbances, and a host of other complexities resulted in eviction for many of her clients. A few simply missed the community they had experienced in the camp or shelter and so they abandoned their housing. Whatever the reason, some of those that she assisted eventually moved out or were forced out of the housing they once celebrated with her.
Does this mean she failed? Does this mean that the hours she invested in these individuals were wasted? If her measure of success is long term/forever housing – then yes, she failed. The goal was not met. However, if her goal is to meaningfully engage her neighbors, to actively listen, to model community engagement, to make connections among neighbors and community members, to provide the assistance and support requested each day to the best of her ability, to help someone without housing find housing – then she succeeded.
Discouragement and disillusionment in this work occur when we create an unattainable or unrealistic standard for success. We cannot control the course of someone’s life or guarantee that someone will be healthy or create a treatment plan that ensures that someone’s life forever aligns with our ideal. We can, on good days, provide the services promised with compassion and hope. What the client does with those services is out of our control. We make available our agency’s resources, our time, our energy, our compassion in a healthy, appropriate way to our neighbor in need. If they choose not to make the “best” use of what is offered, that is not ours to control.
Somehow we must wrestle with the necessity of defining our mission and determining to whom and how we offer the resources we have. And this is a great struggle within the field of homeless services – do we seek the most vulnerable, the most likely to succeed, the most desperate, the most deserving? Do we offer housing, food, case management, education?How can these things be determined and measured? It is a conversation each individual and agency must constantly re-visit. However, when we determine to offer our services we must be able to release the desire to control all outcomes. While striving to serve as good stewards, we must also trust that what we offer is truly that, an offering, a gift that we cheerfully give believing it has value regardless of how well it is used.
